Poet of a magical Latin American world

AS HE later told it, Gabriel García Márquez, who has died at his home in Mexico City, made the most important decision of his life as a writer at the age of 22 when he joined his mother on a journey by steamer and rickety train to Aracataca, a small town surrounded by swamps and banana plantations in the heart of Colombia’s Caribbean coastal plain. Their purpose was to sell his grandparents’ house, where the author was born and had spent most of his first eight years, brought up by his maternal grandparents.

That trip to Aracataca revived memories that bore fruit in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, the novel that brought García Márquez worldwide fame and a Nobel prize. From its first sentence—"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”—it transported the reader to a magical world of tropical fantasy. Aracataca became Macondo, where rains could last five years or deliver yellow flowers. Colonel Buendía was derived from his maternal grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, who had fought in the Liberal rebellion of 1899-1902 known as the War of the Thousand Days.

In “One Hundred Years of Solitude” time moves in circles and the absurd is routine, as the modern world eddies in invention and tragedy around a forgotten tropical Eden. In its colourful exaggeration, its joyful jumbling of the comic and the tragic, and its celebration of the extraordinary lives of ordinary people, the novel came to epitomise Latin American “magical realism”, even if the roots of the genre lay with the Argentines, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.

García Márquez’s first steps as a writer were as a poet and a journalist, and those talents underlay his extraordinary gift for storytelling. Unlike many writers of Spanish, he preferred short, simple sentences, and they gave his writing a limpid intensity. Yet success was a struggle. Seized with the inspiration that would turn a long unfinished novel about his grandparents’ house into “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, he locked himself away in his house for nine months, exhausting his modest savings and pawning his car only for the manuscript to be rejected by several publishers. The story goes that his wife, Mercedes Barcha, pawned their liquidiser to raise the postage to send the manuscript to Buenos Aires, where it was accepted.

The rest of his oeuvre was relatively slight, the material largely drawn from the same world of the Colombian Caribbean in novels such as “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. In a modulation of theme, he wrote a historical novel about Simón Bolívar’s last, defeated days (“The General in his Labyrinth”) and returned to journalism, of which he was an accomplished exponent, with “News of a Kidnapping”, a powerful account of the horror inflicted on Colombia by the drug war.

Though he installed himself in Mexico City in 1961, Gabo, as he was dubbed, was indelibly a man of the Colombian Caribbean, with its bohemian, macho culture of sex, rum and political strife. Fame brought him political prominence. His critics said that he had a weakness for power. “Gabo loves presidents. My wife likes to tease him by saying that even a vice-minister gives him a hard-on,” one of his friends told the New Yorker.

His memoir of his early life (“Living to Tell the Tale”) suggested a man more committed to friendship than ideology. He was attracted to dictators of the left. He was a close and uncritical friend of Fidel Castro, accepting the gift of a house in Havana. (He also kept a house in the walled colonial city of Cartagena, his spiritual home.) In 1999 he wrote perceptively of Hugo Chávez that he saw in him “two opposite men”, one who had an extraordinary opportunity to save his country and the other “a conjuror who might enter history as just another despot”.

Gabo remained loyal to his roots in founding a journalism foundation in Cartagena. His later years were marred by lymphatic cancer and then Alzheimer’s disease. When he turned up in a bar in Cartagena during the Hay literary festival in 2010 he had become an amiable but spectral figure.

It was not García Márquez’s fault if magical realism became a sterile canon, practised with success by writers of much lesser talent. But younger novelists were surely right when they criticised him for projecting to the world an archaic vision of Latin America, as an exotic and provincial place, incapable of successful modernisation, development and democracy.

On the other hand, Macondo still co-exists with the modern world in many parts of Latin America. García Márquez captured as nobody else has the region’s joyous absurdity, the central place it grants to family and friendship and its exuberant cocktail of sex and tragedy, of pleasure and feud.

"the socialist writer, who lived like an aristocrat even in Havana...
Most socialists do (or rather most influential socialists)"
And why shouldn´t they.A true Aristocrat is bound to have inclinations well above materialism.

Both Cervantes and García Márquez were made literary icons by one book.
GGM views in politics, or even the dubious group of Friends, do not detract from his true genius.
Many LATAM political leaders belong in a Macondian novel setting even today.

I agree. Many people say that "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a boring book, but I enjoyed every page. Reading one hundred years of solitude is like having Latin America tell you all her secrets. Each page says, I am L.A. and this is my story. My hopes, my repeated mistakes, my transfigured ideology, my dependence and underdevelopment, and my aberrant fatalism.

"That trip to Aracataca revived memories that bore fruit in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, the novel that brought García Márquez worldwide fame and a Nobel prize. From its first sentence—"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”—it transported the reader to a magical world of tropical fantasy. Aracataca became Macondo, where rains could last five years or deliver yellow flowers. Colonel Buendía was derived from his maternal grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, who had fought in the Liberal rebellion of 1899-1902 know as the War of the Thousand Days." THE MOST FASCINATING COMMENTARY MAKES THE OBITUARY A UNIQUE FORM OF PRESENTATION.

JUAN RULFO, author of "Pedro Páramo" was one of the most influential writers to Garcia Marquez, and to many the root of magical realism as a genre (not necessarily Borges or Cortazar as stated above). Garcia Marquez has just arrived to Mexico. Alvaro Mutis gave him the book "Lea esa vaina, carajo, para que aprenda".

The Economist doesn't do justice to the feat of being widely read and cherised in the more than twenty countries of Latin America. No other writer in spanish, not even Cervantes, can come close to that.

Well, I think I'll pass. If flying carpets and Arabs (!) are what passes for great literature where you are then I'll keep my oculars firmly focused on my navel. It sounds as if the Latins are entrapped in their own labyrinth.

My world is big enough -- it has ample room for me and my cupboard full of prunes and bran.

It is the South Americans that seemed "trapped." After all, several readers suggested that if I were Latin I'd understand. That may be true. But, all it proves is that Marquez was just a good regional writer. (I am sure there are similar authors who are the pride of, say, the Balkans or Micronesia.)

So you do not like the guy. Fair enough. You are more the Harry Potter type. That's fine. Luckily for the rest of us the Nobel Foundation will not be calling you any time soon to ask for your opinion on who should win the next Nobel Prize in literature. But in your little world you are entitled to your own opinion.
Now be happy and stop being so bitter.

While I don't agree, I don't dispute your opinion of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but the fact is that García Márquez is read and loved in 21 countries that have a combined population of 600 million people (more than the European Union) and speak the language with the second greatest number of native speakers. I think that his obituary should have stressed that fact whether or not you consider his books worthwhile.

My "favorite" authors are Faulkner, James, Conrad and Dickens. There is more real magic in Yapnapatattha County than in all of Marquez novels combined. Alright, it is a bit on the gothic side but, then, that is the South.

I am sure you are correct in your numbers. Daniel Steele is also "read and loved" by hundreds of millions. Come to think of it, so were Edna Ferber and James Michener. And, I understand that Clive Cussler in coming on strong!

Probaby 99% of British, Canadian, Australian, and U.S. readers who have heard of Jorge Luis Borges, another Latin American Nobel Prize winner,
would be as surprised as you are that the Thousand and One Nights was Borges favorite book. That is because "our" literary experience is narrower than that of educated readers in the Hispanic world.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" was a tedious read. The characters were bizarre and while they might have lives as symbols they hardly exist as of our common clay.

I suppose the writing was sometimes clever (in translation to English) with frequent flashes of wit. You expect this, though, from any competent writer.

If what one wants is "magical realism," you'd be just as well off with "The Wizard of Oz."

It may be that this author's work reveals something profound about Latin America. If so, that's too bad. I read Trollope, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Chekov, Zola, Dante, Shakespeare -- to name a few -- and I am nudged to think about common humanity. When I read "One Hundred Years," I was nudged to think about Arabs and flying carpets. Maybe this means something south of the border (down Mexico way) but it fell flat for me.

This author seems a bit of a cult. It all reminds me of the Carlos Casteneda (remember him?) boom of a few decades ago. We don't hear much these days from the Castnedians and it all, in hindsight, was a bit silly.

Latin America is a world that seems unknown to you, thus your lack of appreciation for something that for us "south of the border" (as you dismissively put it) could easily relate to. Pack your bags, come on down and you might learn to appreciate something your navel gazing has kept you from enjoying.

Castaneda was a fraud in as much as he claimed to be doing an anthropological description(for which he got a UCLA degree) of factual events when in actuality he made it all up.

But he did make up, re-invent and partially re-create, helped by his fluency in Spanish(he was of Peruvian descent), a magical if essentially false world, an "alternate reality" that somehow was fun using as a wedge to bend the most boring inertial paths of everyday life.

I remember crossing the border in my childish and fortunate youth some decades ago and going into the now so famous Sinaloan mountains in search of a shaman, just to find out whatever grain of truth if any could be mined from Castaneda´s stories.

Yes, there was a shaman around Choix. I never found him, but I found many other truer and more worthwhile things.Being in the company of a very open-minded yet inexperienced girl from one of the local colleges, and getting lost with her in the mountains among many adventures, didn´t hurt either.

But comparing Castaneda and Garcia Marquez is like comparing "Days of our lives" and Citizen Kane.

Glad to see you guys are keeping these blogs running with the usual high standards.Hope to join -in around mid-May, once I finish to sort out a few things.

That must be it.Plus not only strict semantic translation, but worldview correlation.Do not worry, the guy who wrote the main article for The Economist is, judging by his piece, totally clueless about Garcia Marquez...and yet he is supposed to be a professionally paid critic for this our esteemed magazine that, like Churchill´s definition of Democracy, is a very bad piece of misunderstanding and disinformation journalism unless compared to everything else the market has to offer.

In my opinion 100 years of Solitude is the best book in Spanish since Don Quixote.Pablo Neruda was awarded a Nobel in literature and said the exact same thing.

I just wish Dostoevsky had been less of an influence on me, and García Márquez more.

I read " La Hojarasca" (dry leaves) when I was in high school in Colombia and it impacted me considerably because it manage to describe the simple life of peasants with their ambitions, dreams and frustrations. A decade later I read " one Hundred Years of Solitude" without knowing it was from the same author. needless to say GGM a genius story teller. However his political support for the narco guerrilla and his friendship with the Cuban Lucifer were his major sins. May God help him!

The world inhabited by a person who makes $220 a day can be understood by another who makes $600. But the guy in the $13,300 a day bracket is simply in another dimension.Their experiences are mutually incomprehensible.It is the difference between the world view of an animal the height of a German Shepherd and that of a worm.Right or wrong, but true nevertheless.

As for raining flowers, I´ve seen it myself.You only have to live under a certain number of Tabebuia chrysantha, if you like bright yellow, or Jacaranda cuspidifolia if you prefer purple.You can see quite a few of those trees lining the street in Mexico City (Calle Fuego 144) where Garcia Marquez lived for the last thirty years.

Just watching the pictures of such trees-and remembering how they look in real life-would lift the heart of anyone with a heart to be lifted.

In fact, since their blossoming season ends at around this time, he probably died under their fall.
....

And on and on goes the article, more an indictment for crimes against cultural and political conformism than an eulogy:

" time moves in circles and the absurd is routine... the modern world eddies in invention and tragedy around a forgotten tropical Eden...colourful exaggeration...celebration of the extraordinary lives of ordinary people..."

Indeed for what I have seen, many ordinary people in the Costeño world Mr. Marquez celebrates do live extraordinary lives in spite of their limited material means, while most people in this "modern world" bent on neutering by homogenization global human variety are schooled to make do with very ordinary lives, while wasting their abundant resources in nothing particular.

This was in fact one of the themes of Mr. García Márquez´s acceptance speech at Stockholm:

"I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary"

I have this vague, sour-sweet but definite feeling that 100 years of Solitude and Love in times of Cholera (of the second book Garcia Marquez said that it was his best, "what will remain, because it speaks of how we really are") are the best books ever written in Spanish since Cervantes´ wrote part I and II of Don Quixote. Pablo Neruda, who as Nobel Prize winner in Literature must know something about this,said:"this is the best novel in Spanish since Don Quixote"

That link is worth being read by itself. As for Faulkner, Marquez explicitly referred to him as "my teacher" in front of the Nobel Committee.But as for Clinton, that brings into the room the elephant that has clouded this issue: García Márquez was not only a passionate defender of anyone who challenged the power of the holders of Big Capital, particularly the Anglo-American financial establishment. He was above all somebody who described a world so different and opposite in views, values and desires to the one built and growing around the current Anglo-Saxon consumerism and acceptance consensus, and yet so appealing to common human desires and experience irrespective of cultural origin, that he awoke us into crossing the line from lethargy to freedom.

Tellingly, like Chaplin, he was barred from entry by the US government for decades -all the way until the Clinton Era.

To understand the second point, reading 100 years of Solitude and Lives in time of Cholera is necessary-and always a good idea.To demonstrate the first, Mr. Marquez´s own words, with a few clarifications between brackets, from his already cited 1982 Nobel acceptance ceremony will be more than sufficient:

"Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda [Senator by the Chilean Communist Party and many times ambassador], one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president[Socialist Allende, killed by Kissinger´s Pinochet coup], entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president[Roldos Aguilera, center-left president of Ecuador-his family blamed the CIA] and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people[Omar Torrijos, who snatched the Torrijos-Carter treaty by which the US would return the Canal and Bases to Panamanian control-most people believe the CIA did him in and used Noriega]. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time[Guatemala´s "born-again" Rios Mont, a Company man too, who was finally convicted of Crimes against Humanity and sentenced to 80 years on 2013.He spent 20 days in jail before being left out on technicalities]. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one - more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing[i.e., the CIA-sponsored tactic of kidnapping and killing people in secret so as to both maintain deniability and foster fear and desperation together with the lack of finality among families and friends of the victims] because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala[By comparison, all US deaths during WWII were 413,000].

Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities[Decades later, this practice helped convict some Argentinian generals, who have been in and out of prison ever since]. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand[1982 low figure-the totals are Guatemala 200,000 dead and 1.5 million displaced out of population at the time of 8 million; El Salvador 75,000 dead, one million left out of 5 million total population...] have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua[of Contra fame], El Salvador[of ARENA death squad fame] and Guatemala[of military genocide fame]. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years.[Final comparison figures would be, using the Guatemalan example, over 8 million dead: source Holocaust Museum of Houston https://www.hmh.org/la_Genocide_Guatemala.shtml]

"One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its population [that included the current President, Ms. Bachelet, and the current Speaker of the house, both of whose fathers were murdered by the CIA-elevated Pinochet]. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens [but not the current President, Pepe Mujica, who couldn´t flee because he was in jail for 14 years, after having been shot by the army in six different occasions.He now donates 90% of his $12,000 monthly salary and drives around in an old VW Beetle]. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes..."

All this is well known today, but in 1982 to utter such words, at least in America, was beyond taboo.Yet García Marquez made them a central point of the most important public event of his life.He was a brave man with a great heart.And yet that barely scratches the surface.

He was a person so committed to giving out to the world whatever worth he found inside him-and there was plenty- that despite being penniless he secluded himself in a little house for 18 months(not nine, at least check your facts)while his wife consumed their savings, sold everything from the car to even the blender, and finally started to ask the butcher and grocer for food on credit.And he didn´t do that in the jungle, but in an upper-middle class Mexican City suburb with riches, jobs and, as the author of this unfortunate article puts it, "modernity", all over and around him.

It is interesting for this fact to sink in and inevitably realize that many wives of many people wouldn´t have had such, not endurance, but inspiration.The attitude of Mrs. Mercedes Barcha proves that the world her husband described in his novels does indeed exist, not only in the tropical coasts of Latin America, but in his home within a large metropolitan area, and inside each of us if we choose to.

---
"The rest of his oeuvre was relatively slight... novels such as “Love in the Time of Cholera”T.E.

Love in the time of Cholera is to 100 years of solitude what the second part of Don Quixote is to the first(both are printed together today,in case you haven´t read it, which in the case of the writer of this obituary is definitely a possibility).

"... macho culture of sex, rum and political strife. " I guess the political strife part did bend some people´s fairness scales here, but the bottom line goes further than just politics: it is the inability by some to accept that a better world may exist beyond their own.

"... even a vice-minister gives him a hard-on"..." He was attracted to dictators of the left."..." amiable but spectral figure."..."It was not García Márquez’s fault if magical realism became a sterile canon"..." archaic vision of Latin America, as an exotic and provincial place"..." the region’s joyous absurdity,...and its exuberant cocktail of sex and tragedy"

What a moving eulogy.Saddam Hussein and Slovan Milosevic wouldn´t have got a better deal.

" [a]place incapable of successful modernisation, development and democracy."

That´s the crux of the matter: the person who lives in shackles wishing everybody else his or her ill-fortune.The Rome of the early V century AD was 1000 years more modern, and several orders of magnitude more developed than the Athens of the V century BC.It was also an infinitely uglier place to live in, although for certain it would have claimed the very opposite, yet was within a generation of its destruction.

As for Democracy in certain surveillance states with managed elections and continuity of policy regardless of popular will or interest, it surely reminds me of Roman elections during the late Empire, which did keep the appearances while the tyrant-emperor and his clique ruled.Or to quote the Princeton mathematical study of 1779 variables released just a few days ago:

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. "

The world Mr. García Márquez describes is not one he defends in his books, because its very existence is its own best defense, just as any good thing doesn´t need much advertisement. Between a world of wives that go eighteen months hungry for the sake of their husbands´ elusive dreams, and one where even George Soros is sued for domestic violence; between one with people living and dying in the name of love, and one of governments herding their subjects into fighting to enslave through physical and mental murder foreign and perhaps happier countries; between living a life following one´s real inner desires and interests, or accepting out of social pressure and inertia to be just one more cog in Chaplin´s "Modern Times" machine... I guess most free people would rather choose the one with yellow flowers raining.

Thank you, Gabriel García Márquez, and your family and friends that supported you, for showing to us, the people born and raised in gloomier places, that other lives are possible.

Would you believe I have printed out this whole series of comments you wrote so I can read them again and again in bed? I do all what I consider the "most worthy" readings in bed.
.
Anyway, you are quite a person with passion, and eyes that see wide and a heart that digs deep. They don't make too many of those any more.
.
Truly pleased to re-meet you on the occasion of a Nobel writer's obituary. /// I have learned most of Neruda's poetry by heart - unfortunately in English - alas! I don't read Spanish. I wish...
.
PS: You are right, North of the Border, we have a country where everyone aspires to be different in exactly the same way. The only difference there is is how many percent fat.

Thanks, you will make me blush.I hope I wasn´t exceedingly hard to the writer of the obituary.When somebody dies it is natural to ask a friend to read out an eulogy.To pick somebody who disliked the deceased to do the job was a sign of dubious taste on the part of our esteemed newspaper.

As the astute psychologist that you are I would recommend reading Love in times of Cholera.But as a friend I would recommend cutting out the middle man, however great, and going on a trip to any part of the Caribbean or Pacific coast of tropical Latin America, staying in the places the locals do.

I crossed the border for the first time several decades ago.It was the kind of learning experience that makes life worth living.Got to be astute, more or less depending on the area, though.

As for your PS, Tocqueville said exactly that in his Democracy in America.The key to overcome that problem is to "let 1000 flowers bloom"- allow for variety and differentiation.Again my permanent and I hope not exceedingly boring call towards limiting horizontal integration of economic units, concentration of capital ownership and dominant positions in any field, but very particularly in information distribution and entertainment.

Not one Google but many, not one Youtube but many, and so on.How come Standard oil was broken at the turn of the XX century and now nobody even talks of breaking up Google? Have people shrank like late Roman Empire statues?

Sorry I haven´t been able to participate as much as I used to in the Democracy in America blog -I´m doing some stuff but I think I will have more space around mid-May.Hearing from you was an unexpected pleasure.

jvictor again, Hahaha! I don't know that you were exceedingly harsh on the writer of this piece. I think you certainly spoke more convincingly than he/she. But I also have a feeling the writer's inadequacy likely reflects a general lack of life experience and exposure to other cultures, and the constricted and restricted world-view that results. Neither contains the element of ill-intent. I have known people who would listen to Beethoven's Nineth or Bach's St. Mark's Passion (conducted by, say, Abbado or Rattle) and blurt, "What's the big deal? Miley the Twerk is better music." That would be how and what these folks honestly "received" given what their are able to "receive". The absence of ill intent is important.To be fair, I think most of us (myself most certainly included) uttered utter nonsense when we are unaware of our utter ignorance. Hopefully those embarrassing instances decrease as the quest for knowledge and basis for our closely held personal view on things improve, not just quantitatively but qualitatively. TE did a most embarrassing review of the works of a Chinese Nobel literature winner some time ago. The utter ethnocentrism was so pronounced it was cringe-worthy. But then one sometimes does not expect more. TE is not the world's authority on culture nor does it presume to be. It on the whole is a good enough paper with some very informed and educated writers. On the whole, I would give it a B, on a good day, a B+.
.
I certain will read Cholera first per your recommendation. As to cutting out the middle man, that is always the best way to learn anything! Provided one has the innate ability or intelligence required in discerning the true, the false, the good, the bad. Writers and artists - the real ones, not the counterfeits (you are correct, Castaneda was a fraud, a shyster) are society's "sensors". When they document what they witness, they are our muses. I have a positive bias for muses.
.
I think the ideal of "individualism" in American life has exerted both negative and positive pressure on its cultural ethos. The odd irony is the very quest for individualism has resulted in robotism. For everything and anything a person wants to be, there is a recipe for it. Resulting in "you see one, you see them all" when you the "thing". That is not good, nor the true meaning of "individualism".
.
In truth, how does one go about being an "individual"? I think first: Relax. One does not have to be like anyone else, or , for that matter, unlike anyone else. Any time a person gives in to the pull or press to be like or unlike another person, the battle of being an individual is lost. Horizontal integration of economic units, and I add, religious blindfaith, has led to the obliteration of authenticity in both individuals and the integrated unit that result. Literally, we have a situation that can only be described as "you see one, you see them all". Kind of scary.
.
Information distribution? That is an even trickier matter. People are not all born equal. We learn at different speeds. We are drawn to different interests. Some people are indeed smarter than others. Einstein's brain is very different from most people's brain. Other than a schema where those who are given more by the Creator (I am talking about genes and innate aptitudes) take the initiative to look out and take care of those who are given less, I don't see how human society can in truth and with honesty say it aspires to achieving "justice" for all. But of course, the ultra-religious dump all egregious injustice to "Manifest Destiny". This is even more scary than roboticism. For now not only are people hollowed of their brain, they are hollowed of their heart. And it is said there is a special place for them when they go.
.
Maybe Google's turn will come. The timeline for things to work is not "one size fits all". I am an optimist. I don't believe in the workings of Ghost, Holy or Unholy. I believe in the ripeness of ordinary human situations. That ripeness is a combined culmination of human efforts and the efforts of Nature. In due course, everything always work out in the direction of true justice.
.
Reading your and a couple of other commenters' comments is always a pleasure. I learn from you all. It's great. So thanks to you all.
.
Whatever "stuff" you are working on, all the best! We will see you when we see you. :)
.
PS: Don't be concerned about a reply if you are busy. Real life stuff is always more important. :)

" TE did a most embarrassing review of the works of a Chinese Nobel literature winner some time ago"

It must have been quite an experience, between surrealist and hilarious.

Incidentally, I´m looking forward to read him(Mo Yan).I intended to but never got around to do it.Interestingly I´ve been told he was influenced by García Márquez. Is Red Sorghum the right place to start?

---
I think some parts of Bach´s St. Matthew´s Passion are at the very top of what humankind has done right.For me, it is the very best and not a week passes by that I do not devote a few minutes to lament that nothing superior has been created in this contemporary age some are so hollowly proud of.

Certainly if Bach was of this century and recently deceased, as editor of The Economist I wouldn´t delegate Bach´s obituary to a person whose interest in music stops at the Justin Beaver level.

"...an anachronistic vision of a Europe devoted to mysticism, sacramental wine and intractable theology...the region´s joyous absurdity and its obsession with the otherworldly contemplation of pain and the eternal...It is not his fault if organ music is perceived as outdated... even a simple bishop would give him a hard on...The rest of his oeuvre was relatively slight with minor works such as Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the Well-Tempered Clavier or the Goldberg Variations"

No kidding.

....

Perhaps The Economist has overextended itself and needs to concentrate on what it does best: economics.It is top of the field on that one, even if not unbiased. I´ve read this magazine since my teenage years, and hope for its betterment,not its demise.

...
" Any time a person gives in to the pull or press to be like or unlike another person, the battle of being an individual is lost. Horizontal integration of economic units, and I add, religious blindfaith, has led to the obliteration of authenticity in both individuals and the integrated unit that result. Literally, we have a situation that can only be described as "you see one, you see them all". Kind of scary."

So true.

"Information distribution?"
Tricky to achieve perfection, but to improve on today´s Universal Broth is as easy as eradicating illiteracy.Only political will is lacking.

I agree with your idea that those who understand the most and have the most should help the rest rise up the ladder.Both 1776 and 1789 were led from the top down, and very successfully.The problem comes when the people who can change things for the better, do it for the worse for whatever capricious reason.Then societies die.

But that´s a whole different story, on which I would feel honored to exchange views with you in the future.

Quick ans to your Q which book to start with. Mo Yan is a prolific writer but likes to write by hand using ink and paper rather than by typing using a pinyin input method (my own preference as well although I don't use the brush any more as it is way too time-consuming and good rice paper is too expensive!). He says pinyin input limits vocabulary (I concur). I recommend for a quick read (if you can find it in translation. You understand of course any translation of literary work is bound to lose a lot - not unlike playing a Chopin Nocturne on an electric keyboard - since you read Marquez in the original) Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out . He wrote it in not even 2 months. It is a fun read and in it you can get a flavor of not only the kind of things he likes to write about, but how his mind works. I don't want to give away the plot. Suffice it to say it is a satire. The problem with the TE review on Mo Yan was not only did it opine Mo wrote about the wrong subjects (should be treatises on human rights) but the manner he wrote was bad. This from a reviewer who didn't read a single word of Chinese. So say Mo wrote about a pea. TE thinks he should write about an elephant. Mo picked up the pea with a pair of chopsticks, pea intact. TE thinks he ought to spear through it with a fork, mashed.

Funny how ethnocentrism works.

Your paragraph about Bach's oeuvre is hilarious!

Thank you for a great chat as usual. I am delighted by your humor and sense of the absurd.

You're wrong to suggest "the rest of his oeuvre was relatively slight". Gabo considered "Love in the Time of Cholera" to be his best book and many of his readers agree. And while he may not have been thinking of his pal Fidel Castro when he wrote "Autumn of the Patriarch," this book will last as long as Latin America's weakness for caudillos.

I wonder reading that " Love in the Time of Cholera " Gobo considered to be his best book.I was bored reading that novel Gobo only given importance to hero but what about sentiments of heroin he never described.Is she was dole dancing on tune of novelist. was she was not in love with her first husband?I am really puzzle reading one sided sentiments of hero

Yes, it is true he was more centered on Florentino than on Fermina,but that was intentional in so far as the book was almost a study on Florentino´s love for her. Nevertheless, Fermina´s feelings, first childish love, then rejection, after the years bewildered distaste, curiosity and finally the realization of the great man she had missed sharing a life with,and their reunion, are masterfully described.

Florentino had to allow for sufficient time to regain Fermina´s attention and the chance to be seen with more receptive eyes.That process took decades and is the theme of the book, how to regain her love.Describing Fermina´s emotions towards their initially shared love during all those years would have been idle, in so far as she had none: she conventionally loved the man she had married.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is basically a parallel book to Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America.
A beautiful writer and those that dislike his choice in friends usually only have a problem with Caudillos that aren't on "their team."

Garcia Marquez had been quoted as saying the two early influences on his writing were Kafka and the Mexican writer, Juan Rulfo, whose "Pedro Paramo" he learned practically by heart.

I have only read vol. 1 of his memoir but for me it was more of a page-turner than his most famous novel. Also liked very much the novel based on Simon Bolivar's life and the collections of his stories, including the most recent, titled in English Strange Pilgrims.